Transnational criminal law (TCL) is at the forefront of contemporary legal scholarship, addressing the increasing complexity of crimes that transcend national borders, including organized crime, terrorism, human trafficking and corruption. This article critically examines the historical evolution and current challenges of TCL, with a focus on the interplay between international cooperation, national sovereignty and the harmonization of legal standards. Using the exile of Napoleon Bonaparte as a historical case study, the article traces the transformation of international criminal responsibility from the ad hoc political mechanisms of the nineteenth century to the codified procedures of the International Criminal Court and the Rome Statute and then to treaty-based global counteraction of crime. The analysis highlights persistent fragmentation in TCL, including inconsistencies in liability, corporate responsibility and sentencing, particularly in transitional and post-conflict societies. Special emphasis is placed on the necessity for legal harmonization, the protection of human rights and the development of effective enforcement mechanisms to address cross-border crime. The article employs comparative legal analysis, doctrinal research and policy evaluation to propose pathways for reform, including enhanced international cooperation, unified legal definitions and the integration of international human rights standards. The findings underscore the urgent need for a cohesive global framework to ensure justice, security and accountability in the face of evolving transnational threats.

Quantitative analyses have the potential to contribute to transitional justice mechanisms, via empirical evidence supporting the memory of victims, allocating proportional responsibility among perpetrators, determining legal responsibility, and supporting historical memory and clarity. However, most data available in transitional justice settings are incomplete. Conducting quantitative analyses relying solely on what is observable and knowable leads to not only incomplete but often incorrect analytical results. This can harm rather than contribute to transitional justice mechanisms. This article outlines different types of data, the ways in which observable data, on their own, are insufficient for most quantitative analyses of interest, presents these limitations via a case study from Syria, and introduces statistical methods to overcome these limitations.

Transitional justice seeks to address legacies of violence around political transition from authoritarianism and armed conflict. It does so in ways driven by a global discourse that is prescriptive and often remote from the contexts in which it is articulated and the populations it claims to serve. Transitional justice is also embedded in teleological liberal approaches to transition, with a perceived endpoint of liberal democracy. Critical approaches to transitional justice have used qualitative methodologies to understand the agendas of those—notably victims of violence—that transitional justice foregrounds, and to demonstrate that transitional justice mechanisms often serve elite agendas, while minimizing the agency of socially excluded populations. An alternative, minimally explored route to victim engagement with such processes has been the mobilization of victims and victim organizations, an emancipatory approach that seeks to provide a space for victims to engage in transitional justice debates on their own terms. Here, a research engagement with a victims’ organization through a Participatory Action Research modality is described in which researchers support victim engagement in peer research to catalyze a social movement of victims in post-conflict Nepal.

The research activity generating data in times of transition is subject to politicization and needs to deal with widespread distrust due to the legacy of violence or atrocity. This article discusses the main principles of a research design that took into account these hindrances by making prudence its basic tenet. The objective was to generate understanding of the functioning of Rwanda’s gacaca court process through a heightened awareness in data collection. In doing so, this article calls attention to the importance of a reflective and adaptive research process in times of transitional justice. Two research principles are discussed in detail: immersion and iteration. The latter were adopted to facilitate the generation of context-specific knowledge on both breadth and depth of the transitional justice process. This article demonstrates how a pragmatic stance that draws on a variety of epistemologies and methodological approaches facilitates data collection as well as navigation of the field of study. It will be argued that data collection and the activity of navigating the field while collecting data reciprocally produce knowledge.

How and why did Canada end up with a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) rather than a judicially based public inquiry in response to Indian Residential Schools? Using a constructivist-interpretivist approach with interview research with twenty-three key actors, this article traces the path toward the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement. It examines in particular the shift from calls for public inquiry to truth and reconciliation. In sourcing the idea of a TRC, it gauges the balance between transnational influences and home-grown elements and suggests that two different approaches to a truth commission were merged during the settlement negotiations. One approach, associated with the Assembly of First Nations, focuses on accountability and public record, and the other, associated with survivor and Protestant organizations, is more grassroots and community-focused. This article looks at hybridity and gaps in the TRC’s design, suggesting that the two visions of a truth commission continue to exist in tension.